Klekovača Competition
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION FOR AN URBAN PLANNING AND ARCHITECTURAL PRELIMINARY DESIGN OF TOURIST CENTRE ON THE KLEKOVACA MOUNTAIN IN REPUBLIC OF SRPSKA, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
The principal concept that lays behind the project for Klekovača is the project for a new city, in other words the idea that the resort in itself is a city and thus that the core of the project is not how to design a tourist centre but how to design a city.
This conceptual choice is based on different aspects: first of all on the physical features of future Klekovača but it also is based on the role of the public space, that will have to be similar to the ones which characterize any urban context and its atmosphere: open, common, social, dense and various.
Starting from this concept – designing a new city – the question then becomes: how can we do it? Following this question we have chosen a model and, together with the model, an Operating System. The model we have chosen is the Roman model.
The Roman model is in a sense the unique real universal prototype for the foundation of a new city. Its universal role is based not only on the the famous grid which drives the moment of the foundation but also on its capacity of driving all the transformations occurring over time and of keeping together all the complex relationship which occur in a city in terms of flows and programs. Following the generic form of the grid the roman model is thus a real operating system able to interact with different conditions and thus to customize the city structure according to local, topographical, climatic or cultural conditions.
The second important concept behind the project for Klekovača has in fact been the research for a new sustainability. Given the special location of the resort we have been looking for a new relation between natural and artificial, not anymore a juxtaposition but a new dialogue. In Klekovača the topography and the geography of the site, its genius loci, give in fact specificity to the grid, deleting its generic aspect.
In so doing the project overcome the usual contradiction between natural and artificial, keeping both as part of the same system. The landscape enters in fact in the grid defining in a single movement the built areas and the voids of the nature. In Klekovača the Roman model has been hybridized: while in the original roman scheme the limites were important to define what was inside and what was outside the city, in Klekovača the edges of the city don’t define the artificial vs the natural but define a field in which natural and artificial coexist.
